Publications 

My book, To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions (Columbia University Press 2019), is a sociological history of political contestation over affirmative action and open admissions retrenchment in public universities.

Through an examination of challenges to race-and-class inclusive policies in sites across the nation, this book considers the shifting American racial landscape in the context of neoliberalism and its racial logics of diversity and colorblindness. In it, the text answers why affirmative action has persisted for so long in the face of resistance, and why its end is likely imminent. 

To FulFill These Rights is the winner of the 2020 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (Division on Racial and Ethnic Minorities) and the inaugural Ida B. Wells-Barnett Book Award from the Association of Black Sociologists. Choice Reviews selected it at as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2021.

It has also been reviewed in American Journal of Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, History of Education Quarterly, Social Policy & Administration, and Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.

Read my piece on the path to affirmative action for the Columbia University Press blog and read the introduction to my book. Other pieces related to this book appear in The Sociologist and Inside Higher Ed.

My work also appears in EPD: Society & Space, Du Bois Review, City & Community, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and the City, Design and Culture, The Black Scholar, Research in Social Movements, Conflict, and Change; Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Contemporary Sociology, Journal of African American History, and Issues in Race and Society: An Interdisciplinary Global Journal.

My next book project considers Black resistance to the urban crisis in 1970s and 1980s era Central Brooklyn.